"His claims to be strongly committed to civil liberties are simply not credible, given that the plain reading of the law would clearly hold Bush's actions illegal under both the Fourth Amendment and FISA, and to hold otherwise requires gymnast-like contortions of the law made by such well-known dispassionate supporters of civil liberties as Hugh 'Harriet Miers is a solid B+' Hewitt and Mark 'Who are you gonna believe about the government's torture reports, me or someone who's read them?' Levin", Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns and Money

If you're a financial freak try online forex, forex online has never been easier; experience forex trading at the leading forex broker offering forex managed accounts offering you the opportunity to trade forex online with state of the art real trading conditions.

Webmaster or site owner? Join the leading forex affiliate program and start earning from your advertising space.

The deadline approaches

Comments (23)

I’ve already voted. I could, I suppose, drag car pool people to the polls next Tuesday, but here in Tennessee we’re not even considered a battleground state. So, there’s nothing more I can do.

This cake is already baked. All’s we can hope for is that the Baracky people just don’t have the enthusiasm to get out and vote. Will that happen? Will those who’ve already collected payment from King Belshazzar want to keep the spigot turned on, or will they just sit this one out?

The character of this little Republic is being measured. “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin”; will we, the collectivist majority of the USA, be found wanting? I think deep-down we all know the answer to that.

I was joking but I know what you’re talking about, cranky. (It’s strange that I say cranky rather than d. Weird.) I tutor high school kids in math and it was actually suggested that I have a chaperon for girls. This was for sessions that take place in the school library.

Thus the power structure, through the agency of those who carry out the sanctions, those anonymous components of the system, will spew the greengrocer from its mouth. The system, through its alienating presence in people, will punish him for his rebellion. It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self-defense dictate it. The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety. . . .

{17}The original and most important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all the others, is simply an attempt to create and support the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth. In other words, serving truth consistently, purposefully, and articulately, and organizing this service. This is only natural, after all: if living within the truth is an elementary starting point for every attempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of the system, if it is the only meaningful basis of any independent act of political import, and if, ultimately, it is also the most intrinsic existential source of the “dissident” attitude, then it is difficult to imagine that even manifest “dissent” could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life.

OT, here’s a bit of Jeff bait: An unselfaware Peggy Noonan begging for a cockslapping:

Why did the president make such mistakes? Why did he make decisions that seemed so unknowing, and not only in retrospect?

Because he had so much confidence, he thought whatever he did would work. He thought he had “a gift,” as he is said to have told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He thought he had a special ability to sway the American people, or so he suggested to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

But whenever he went over the heads of the media and Congress and went to the people, in prime-time addresses, it didn’t really work. He did not have a magical ability to sway. And—oddly—he didn’t seem to notice.

It is one thing to think you’re Lebron. It’s another thing to keep missing the basket and losing games and still think you’re Lebron.

And that really was the problem: He had the confidence without the full capability. And he gathered around him friends and associates who adored him, who were themselves talented but maybe not quite big enough for the game they were in. They understood the Democratic Party, its facts and assumptions. But they weren’t America-sized. They didn’t get the country so well.

It is a mystery why the president didn’t second-guess himself more, doubt himself. Instead he kept going forward as if it were working.

Gee, Peg, a right proper riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that one is.

Maybe you and Brooksie can get together with T. Coddington Van Voorhees and sort it all out while boating this weekend.

Login/Register

Advertisements

DHgate.com is the leading B2B online trading marketplace for china wholesale products, you can buy high quality china wholesale apparel, electronics, security cameras and other wholesale products on DHgate.com.